Emission and GDP
How emission change with GDP?
Figure 4. Linked view of historical CO2 emissions change with GDP. Before the year of 2010, high-income countries have always been the main contributors to CO2 emissions. This trend changed after 2010, with upper-middle-income countries surpassing high-income countries to become the largest contributor to global CO2 emissions in terms of total emissions.
Figure 1 shows positive relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions. In addition, Figure 2 shows country income type is also affect the CO2 emissions distributed by sector. Here, we conduct Figure 4 to see the detailed change of CO2 emissions with GDP.
Figure 4 is a linked scatter plot with a horizontal bar plot at the bottom developed by Plotly package in python. The plot contains a slider with animation. Data from 1990 to 2019 will be displayed after the click. The scatter plot takes the emission of CO2 in a country on the x-axis, the emission of CO2 per capita in a country on the y-axis. The bubble size represents the population of a specific country, and the color of the bubbles represents the income group corresponding to a country. In the bar plot, the x-axis represents the overall CO2 emission number, and the y-axis represents different income groups. The plot is interactive, and hovering over the bubbles displays detailed information about each data point, such as country, total emission, emission per capita, income group, and population. And hovering over the bar chart displays detailed information about the specific income group and the overall emission of this group.
The scatter plot was inspired by the “gapminder” plot but with improvements by adding a horizontal bar chart to carry more information. The color encodes to correspond with income groups. Bright red was used to represent a high income group, while light green is used to represent a lower-income group, which matches Figure 2. The initial development of the plot used bokeh package, but due to the requirement of a server for the interactive bokeh plots, it was ultimately switched to the plotly package.
Before the year of 2010, high income countries have always been the main contributors to CO2 emissions. As shown in the plot, the small-sized bubbles are always located above others, which indicates that the high-income countries have smaller populations but higher emissions per capita. Lower-middle income countries, with their large population size, have consistently ranked second in total CO2 emissions, despite their low per capita emission rate. However, this trend changed after 2010, with upper-middle income countries surpassing high-income countries to become the largest contributor to global CO2 emissions in terms of total emissions. The reason for this shift is not hard to find: some countries changed their income category and brought their high emissions to the new category as well. This is a crucial point to be considered, as without paying attention to the emissions from large population countries, CO2 emission will be uncontrollable with the period of economic development.